When I read the pulp paperback edition of William Hood’s Mole, the inside story of Soviet military intelligence officer Pyotr S. Popov, who became a defector and CIA double agent in place, I knew immediately that it was somehow connected with the assassination of President Kennedy, though I didn’t know how. But I wasn’t surprised, when the CIA released the CIA’s pre-assassination records on Lee Harvey Oswald and William Hood’s name was cc’d on many of the documents.
What stood out to me was not only the fact that Popov was an important character in the Great Spy vs. Spy Game of the Cold War period (1945-1992), but the extent that tradecraft was used by both sides, just as it was used by all sides in the JFK drama.
At the first meeting of the Warren Commission Allen Dulles brought a book with him about American assassins by Robert Donovan, the same author who wrote PT109, that makes the case for American assassinations being perpetrated by deranged lone nut cases. Instead Dulles should have passed around copies of his own book The Craft of Intelligence, that explains how the Great Game of espionage is played by certain argreed upon rules that date back thousands of years.
The fact that the assassination of President Kennedy was a covert intelligence operation, regardless of Lee Harvey Oswald’s role, is buttressed by the multiple covert operations that are entangled with the Dealey Plaza operation, including the numerous defectors and double-agents that are players in the great game and the assassination drama. Oswald, Richard Case Nagel, Rolando Cubella, Golitzen, Nosenko, Popov, Sylvia Duran, Igor Vaganov, Fedora, Philby and the Cambridge spy ring, and Popov’s mole.
Were they real or false defectors? Who were the double-agents really working for? Who was the high level mole in the CIA? This book tries to answer those questions by focusing on the identity of Popov warned us about. But what do we do with what we learn from all this?
As Soviet spy Rudolph Able said, “What is the next move when you don’t know what the game is?” Why it’s the Great Game, the same game that has been played since the days of Sun Tzu and The Art of War.
And now, with the unleashing of so many millions of government documents under the JFK Act, it is unnerving that we must first decipher the alias and code names before beginning to understand what they actually say, and Mary Ferrell has assisted us greatly along these lines. .
Mary Ferrell: CIA Cryptonyms / Featured CIA Cryptonyms 2 / / https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Main_Page.html
In his Prelude to this volume, Professor Peter Dale Scott says, “An unsuspected consequence of the John F. Kennedy assassination and cover-up has been an unprecedented exposure of previously secret CIA and FBI records. In the resulting new field of serious scholarly research, John Newman, with an intelligence background of his own, has emerged as a preeminent master. For his latest volume, Uncovering Popov’s Mole, Newman has perused thousands of conflicting documents, and distilled them into a coherent answer to a problem that CIA professionals were unable to resolve; who was the Soviet mole in the CIA. Newman’s arguments will, I am sure, dominate all future discussions of this surprisingly important political question.”
It would take years, if not decades to figure it all out if it wasn’t for a handful of dedicated researcher who have waded through the morass of records, took a dive into the Rabbit’s Hole, went into the wilderness of mirrors, and came out with a sort of GPS road map of how to get through it all with an understanding of whose who and what’s true and false.
Trained as a US Army intelligence analysist, Professor Dr. John Newman is the best of this lot, that also includes Bill Simpich, Rex Bradford, Jefferson Morley, Rolf M. Larsson and a few others. And Newman has the tenacity to try to explain it to the rest of us. He is doing so in a series of books on the JFK assassination, and while Armageddon was set to be published now, this book is sort of a speed bump on the road that has pushed it back to later this year.
It isn’t so much the answer to the question of who was Popov’s mole? Or who killed JFK? Rather it is how we can answer these questions. Newman’s book Uncovering Popov’s Mole isn’t important for attempting to answer the question, and identifying the mole, but it’s more important for laying out the means – the type of Counter-Intelligence - CI investigation that is needed to really break these cases. We have to acknowledge that we are no longer conducting a criminal investigation of the assassination, looking for assassins, murderers, co-conspirators and perjurers, but rather searching for the truth by whatever means necessary, with a critical eye.
Malcolm Blunt, a British researcher who had spent more time at the National Archives than anyone I know, has collected a massive archive of documents that he thought were relevant enough to copy and share with others, including Newman and myself, and I must credit Malcolm with passing along the NPIC Pathfinder documents that I consider key records necessary for understanding what really occurred at Dealey Plaza.
Blunt has been a big help to Newman as well, and introduced him to the records of Blunt’s late associate, Termnent H. “Pete” Bagley (aka Amos Booth), a CIA CI officer who, after reading the pre-assassination documents on Oswald that Blunt provided him, concluded that Oswald was a “witting” false defector.
Today Blunt says, “For nearly 60 years we have witnessed the proliferation of highly individualized conceptions of one man’s identity: who was Lee Harvey Oswald?”
“From the publication of the Warren Report in 1964, all the
way up to the present day,” Blunt continues,
“range and diversity of opinion about Oswald has emerged from a doctored,
incomplete, a fractured documentary record which is then reflected, quite
naturally, within a fragmented field of assassination researachers….by which we
find ourselves still grappling to ascertain fundamental answers to fundamental
questions. In addition, we must contend with a myriad of intelligence agencies
and watchdogs that seemed pre-programmed to thwart any meaningful research.”
Blunt believes that in this book, and the others in Newman’s ongoing series, Newman is creating a “paradigm shift,” but to access this new paradigm “John must first introduce to the reader a detailed chronology of Cold War deceptions: KGB v. CIA, spy v. spy, bona fide defectors v. false defectors, advocates v. detractors, true molehunts v. false molehunts. This lesson will prove essential if we are to understand the context of what is new in relation to what must be replaced.”
And I for one am following along, and I think I get it, though I was predisposed to accept his work because it dovetails so much with my own.
One of Newman’s positive attributes is that when he realizes he was wrong, he corrects himself, as he has done here with James Jesus Angleton.
As noted years ago, the CIA paperwork associated with Oswald’s 1959 defection, that should have been disseminated to various relevant desks within the Soviet Russia Division (SRD), instead, as Blunt puts it, “went sideways,” to the Agency’s Office of Security. The idea was to catch to mole, suspected to be within the SRD, when Oswald’s file was reviewed, using the false defector as bait to surface the mole.
Newman used to call it the “Angleton mole hunt,” though now he realizes that Angleton had an office – the CI – Counter-Intelligence Staff – that supported the OS – Office of Security, that had 700 personnel, and the molehunt was actually under the control of the Research Branch (RB) headed by Bruce Solie, not a name you will find in the Warren Report or most books on the JFK assassination.
Not a spoiler, the name to most people means nothing, just as the names of the first class snipers who blew off JFK’s head will mean nothing when we learn them, as they are not as important as who they were working for.
Angleton was once quoted as saying, “A house has many rooms. I was not privy to who shot John,” that I take to mean Angleton may have been in on the pre-assassination use of Oswald and his files, but not the conspiracy to kill the President, though he knows who it was. And d it wasn’t Solie’s room either.
I believe the room at the CIA where the Dealey Plaza operation was planned was at the Miami JMWAVE station, where the Pathfinder plan to kill Castro was pulled off the NPIC shelves and resighted to kill JFK in Dallas. But to get there, we must learn to use the CI tradecrafts much like Newman uses to uncover Popov’s mole.
In compiling the mainly circumstantial evidence that indicates Solie was Popov’s mole in the CIA Newman focuses on Solie’s travel records, that are certainly important. In the course of my own research I had a name file, a subject file, a chronological file and what I called a Time-Place-Matrix model of places where and when people me and things occurred.
Solie’s travel records indicate that he visited Beriut, Lebanon, what Newman considers a clincher, since British-Soviet double-agent Kim Philby, Angleton’s mentor and three martini lunch drinking partner, also was living at the same time.
As Newman puts it: “If the mole cannot communicate, then his high-echelon access is of no use. In the end, encrypted messages are vulnerable to being broken. Only face-to-face meetings in a safe location with the other service (for which the mole is working) ensure the continuing viability of the penetration. And therefore, it is the means by which the mole must travel to the safe location that – while necessary for secure communication – remains the ultimate Achilles heel in such espionage operations due to the possible exposure from the need to travel…”
In February 1957 Solie traveled to Beirut where Newman suspects he met with Philby, who was staying at his father’s rural estate instead of his own apartment, that we know (from Spy Among Friends), was bugged by the British MI5.
Ian Fleming’s official biographer suspects
that when Fleming visited Beirut he too visited Philby. Fleming arrived in
November 1960 on his way to Kuwait, where he had been commissioned to
write the official history of the Gulf emirate by the Kuwait Oil Company.
In Beirut he met up with his friend and MI6 contact Nichoals Elliot.
According to Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett, “…Elliot was delighted to see
him. Their conversation ranged over a variety of intelligence-related topics,
including Kim Philby, a key participant in the Missing Diplomats affair, who
had been working in Beirut as a newspaperman since 1956. Ian told
Elliot that he had his own minor freelance intelligence assignment to perform:
the then NID chief Vice Admiral Sir Norman Denning had asked him for
information about the Iraq port of Basra…Ian did not delay…at 10:30 sharp he
asked to leave, saying he had a rendezvous with an Armenian in the Place de
Canons in the center of town.”
Elliot
had the distinct impression Fleming had arranged to see a pornographic film,
“but perhaps, speculated Lycett, “Ian was meeting Philby, whom he had certainly
met during the war.”
Now
it is quite bizarre that Solie, who may have taken over Philby’s role with
Angleton, flew to Beirut where Philby was living, but how we come to know this
is even more bizarre.
Ancestry.com
In
checking out all of the open source internet information on Bruce Solie
Newman’s crew discovered that in 2010 Solie’s travel records had been posted on line at Ancestry.com,
sometime after his death, probably by a granchild or inlaw, and those records
show that Solie traveled to Beirut when Philby was there in the spring of 1957.
“It
is a fact,” says Newman, “that Bruce Solie arrived in Beirut at a time when a
replacement for Angleton’s mentor since 1948 – Kim Philby – was urgently
needed,” and Solie filled that bill.
As
Newman says, “The location of spies on treasonous missions away from their
place of work are crucial evidence of their true loyalties and intentions. That
turns out to be the case for nearly all of Solie’s overseas travel records....,”
and “The reader will need to decide for themselves if this is another reason
for considering Bruce Solie as a likely candidate for Popov’s mole.”
And
I would request that anyone with access to William Harvey’s travel records
(June-Dec. 1963) to please post them on line, as someone did with Solie’s records.
So
as the search for Popov’s mole comes to an end, it is not the name that counts,
but the means by which we have come to know it, and those are the means, the
CI- Counter-Intelligence tradecraft by
which we must adapt to use across the board in our study of the assassination
of President Kennedy.
William
Kelly
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